William Carlos Williams

The content of William's writing tends toward “pure poetry.” He seldom moralizes or indulges in philosophical or religious sermonizing. The same is true of William's medical background. He uses his scientific training and his experience as a doctor frequently in his fiction (as in his fine 1932 short-story collection, The Knife of the Times, and Other Stories), but it seldom appears in his poetry, except in an occasional term or phrase borrowed from medicine. As a writer of fiction, he published four novels and a number of first-rate short stories , William's style is more conventional than in his poetry, but it is often ironic, sometimes even apparently callous, in attitude (Mariani, pp. 121-129). His medical stories contain some of the most powerful descriptions of disease and suffering in modern fiction. In his fiction, as in his poetry, however, Williams is objective rather than indifferent. The first is vigorous formal experimentation in poetry and prose, frequently in the direction of abandoning traditional forms and, in his poetry, of mastering the possibilities of free verse, of which he remains the most influential practitioner.

Early in his career, Williams rejected the literary heritage of the Victorian era, particularly its trite diction and stultified verse forms. He strove constantly to achieve the brusque nervous tension, the vigor and rhetoric, of American speech. William's poetry may be the most accessible and humane in modern American literature. Virtually all of William's lyrics illustrate his determination to develop in poetry the rhythm, diction, and syntax of the language actually spoken in Rutherford, New Jersey. Many of his lyrics are about poetry, what it is, how to write it, but a poem about poetry is also, for Williams, about how to live, for poetry is essentially the direct “contact”, the fresh perceiving and feeling by which life becomes worth living.

The music of William's poems seems at first to be a deliberate absence of music, and it takes some time to perceive the finely controlled dance that the hesitations and abruptnesses of the free-verse lines accomplish. William's revolutionary ideas led him to write poetry that was simple, direct, and apparently formless. Like nineteenth century American poet Walt Whitman, Williams used common-place American scenes and speech to portray contemporary urban America.

In all of his work, Williams carried forward a revolutionary heritage that was welcomed by younger writers responsive to his example and influence. While steadfastly supporting the principle of free organic form, he also helped refresh and renew the language of poetry by freeing it from stereotyped associations. William's writing reveals openness to experience of all kinds and a refusal to accept doctrinaire theories and solutions.

This Is Just to Say

The rhythm of everyday speech, the absence of punctuation, the title, the message of “I have eaten/ the plums,” and the brevity of “This Is Just to Say” combine to suggest that the poem poses as a hastily scribbled note. The pose may convey the theme of William's poem. If so, the parallel between this particular poem and ...